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Browse, search and serendipity: building approachable digital editions

Chapter of: Digital editing and publishing in the twenty-first century

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Metadata
TitleBrowse, search and serendipity
Subtitlebuilding approachable digital editions
ContributorAlison Chapman (author)
Martin Holmes(author)
Kaitlyn Fralick(author)
Kailey Fukushima(author)
Narges Montakhabi Bakhtvar(author)
Sonja Pinto (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.62637/sup.GHST9020.6
Landing pagehttps://books.sup.ac.uk/sup/catalog/book/sup-9781917341073/chapter/7
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightAlison Chapman, Martin Holmes, Kaitlyn Fralick, Kailey Fukushima, Narges Montakhabi and Sonja Pinto
PublisherScottish Universities Press
Published on2025-04-29
Long abstractLarge digital document collections ideally provide multiple routes into data imagined for different users and different use-cases: thematic and hierarchical (drill-down) browsability for casual users, and precisely-targeted complex search functionality to answer granular queries and generate subcollections for specific research purposes. Responding to recent critical work on digital editions and periodical print surrogates (e.g. Mussell 2012, 2016; Gooding), and on the visual interface as a form of graphic knowledge (Drucker), this chapter will examine the challenges in building a big tent digital project that anticipates users’ needs.  The Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project (DVPP) has a particular interest in responding to this challenge, which is complicated by the nature of its own collection. The project’s methodological principles are based on poetry’s place on the  periodical page, from the inclusion of periodical poem page scans (facsimile browser, poem page rendering), to the indexing protocols (designed around how contemporary periodical readers would understand poems and their illustrations), to encoding a representative sample of poems based on decadal years from 1820 to 1900 (including material as well as poetic features). But our approach to the front end application (facsimile browser, poem page rendering, index of poems and personography, digital edition, advanced search pages) is based around offering the user multiple ways to search and find material that moves away from the poem’s embedded periodical print origins, and even the conceptual and functional principles of the codex, to allow for complex and serendipitous discovery. The challenge of this digital project is to relate the project’s indexing and encoding principles to users’ anticipated research, particularly given the relationship between the index (c.15,500 poems across 21 long Victorian periodicals), personography (c.4,000 records for poets, illustrators and translators), and the TEI XML- encoded poem sample (c.2,000 poems and c. 11,000 lines of poetry). This chapter examines relationships between the underlying metadata and text-encoding, as well as the affordances DVPP will eventually offer the end-user. We conclude by offering guidelines based on building search interfaces that are useful to researchers. Firstly, we address practical problems. Enlarging project features can make interfaces potentially confusing, and expanding interdependencies can also produce incompatible features. Workflow is crucial: user discoverability is contingent on encoding, and yet predicting search parameters is contingent on a good understanding of data that only emerges as the project advances. We suggest a workflow where metadata structures and labels can be trivially revised, with the search and browse interfaces automatically adapted to such changes. Secondly, we turn to the conceptual imagining of the anticipated user, by comparing DVPP with cognate digital editions and commercial indexes and digital surrogates (such as those owned by ProQuest), to ask how digital editions can guide users to engage critically and actively with multiple methods of browse, search, and serendipitous discovery, rather than approaching search functionality as simply a means to an end.
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Alison Chapman

(author)

Alison Chapman is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Canada, where she specialises in nineteenth-century literature and culture and digital humanities. She is the author of Networking the Nation: British and American Women Poets and Italy, 1840–1870 (2015) and The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti (2000), the co-author of A Rossetti Family Chronology (2007), and the editor or co-editor of several collections of essays, including A Companion to Victorian Poetry (2002) and Victorian Women Poets (2000). Currently she is the Principal Investigator of the SSHRC-funded Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project (dvpp.uvic.ca).

Martin Holmes

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3944-1116

Martin Holmes is a programmer in the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre specialising in XML technologies and digital editions. He is the lead programmer on several large digital edition projects including the Map of Early Modern London (MoEML, mapoflondon.uvic.ca) and Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry (dvpp.uvic.ca) and is part of the Project Endings team (endings.uvic.ca). He served on the TEI Technical Council from 2010 to 2015 and was managing editor of the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative from 2013 to 2015.

Kaitlyn Fralick

(author)
https://orcid.org/0009-0000-2629-368X

Kaitlyn Fralick is a PhD candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. She has worked as a graduate research assistant on the Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project (DVPP) since 2018, and she has performed various roles for the project, such as metadata indexer, markup editor and researcher. To date, she has contributed more than 1,000 encoded poems to DVPP. Kaitlyn’s research and teaching interests are rooted in nineteenth-century literature and culture, the Victorian periodical press and the digital humanities. She completed her MA in English (with a concentration on nineteenth-century studies) at the University of Victoria and her Hons. BA in English (with distinction) at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University).

Kailey Fukushima

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7636-1580

Kailey Fukushima is an information professional based in Vancouver, Canada. She holds a Master of Archival Studies and a Master of Library and Information Studies (University of British Columbia, 2023), as well as a Master of Arts in English (University of Victoria, 2020). Kailey’s primary research interests include digitisation and digital collections development, digital humanities research, scholarly communications and user-centred design. She currently works for InterPARES Trust AI, where she contributes to a study on the potential role(s) for artificial intelligence in the digitisation of archives and documentary heritage materials.

Narges Montakhabi Bakhtvar

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7011-7042

Narges Montakhabi Bakhtvar is a doctoral candidate in Theatre Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada. Holding another PhD in English Language and Literature, her research scope covers comparative literature, contemporary Canadian theatre, politics of gender and diasporic subjectivity. Currently, she is working on how different political inscriptions on the body, including the dichotomy between body-at-home and body-in-exile, are captured in the plays by Middle Eastern Canadian playwrights. She is the author of ‘The Body/theatre-in-Pain: (Im)possibility of Wellness in Lisa Kron’s Well’ (Critical Stages/Scènes critiques 2023), ‘The Body in Pain and Pleasure: The Phenomenology of Embodiment in Rosa Jamali’s Poetry’ (Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 2023), ‘The Theatre of the Oppressed in Tehran: Dilemma of Ethics and Engagement’ (Canadian Theatre Review 2022) and ‘Politics of Evasion and Tales of Abjection: Postmodern Demythologization in Angela Carter and Ghazaleh Alizadeh’ (CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 2020).

Sonja Pinto

(author)

Sonja Pinto is a University of Victoria alumnus who holds a BA and an MA in English Literature. She has worked on the Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project for five years, having joined as a Research Assistant in September 2018. Their research interests include Victorian fiction and poetry, narratology, trauma studies, and gender and sexuality. During their time with DVPP, Sonja has worked as both an indexer and encoder.